Category Archives: python

Continuing my saga of visualizing Koornk social network I decided that obvious next step is to map out who talks to who and how much. For this task I used excellent Python library NetworkX that uses pygraphviz to draw the pretty pictures in the end.

Just to explain what you’re looking at:

I downloaded all public conversations from Koornk and filtered out to the ones that use @ somewhere to reference someone else

You need to all-together reference or be referenced 60 times to get on the list (70 people from 1606 made it)

From those 70 people, if two of them talked more then 40-times they got a line between each other

Line thickness is then calculated based on how much they talked to each other

Circle size around each person tells you their cumulative chatter towards others

Fun statistic: about 22% of all message looked at (N=81990), contained @ reference

Pretty pictures

Top down view of all the 70 people who made the cut (click for bigger version)

It turns out that there’s a smaller group of very vocal people within this view, so we naturally want to see zoomed version:

Who talks to who on Koornk and how much (click for bigger version)

Lessons learned

It takes about two days to properly get a hang of NetworkX library to draw something like that. It doesn’t mean you know anything about graph theory, but at least you can start drawing pretty pictures.

Pictures are fun, but next step is probably interactive Flash diagram that allows you to explore these relationship for yourself

Throwing around these data structures actually takes a few seconds on modern PC. Finally something meaningful for it to process.

I wonder how much work would be to properly plot something like this for a subset of Twitter relationship if I maybe drink from their fire-hose long enough. Maybe Gnip guys can fill up a few Terabytes of Hard Drives with back log, if they have it and we start crunching this. (I’m assuming that there’s already a post-graduate student somewhere that’s doing exactly this)

Source: FlickrWhen using python-boto package to list keys in your S3 bucket, you might hit a limit of 1000 keys when using function call bucket.get_all_keys(). In order to get full list of keys just do something along the lines of
keylist = [k for k in self.bucket]

I’ve been playing a bit with writing Google Earth xml files to try to make some nice visualizations. Here is a first screenshot of how users of Slovenian carpooling site Prevoz.org are traveling around the country.

(historical data of all carshares, only showing locations with 10 or more entries in the database).

Aaahh, itâ€™s good to be awake again. Something in summer smell awoke my community and open source spirit in me again which in turn forced me to work once again on old projects and new open source ideas. Currently I only have to announce two things that managed to kick me back in action. Prevoz.org RSS feeds, and an addition of new machine to Morphix nightly builds.
It was of course community effort so greetings also go to administrators and other hackers that helped in making me active again.
It also seems that there is quite some interest in python myspace api, so check out the Google Code project that was setup by Laszlo: myspace-api.